Awesomely addictive games like Candy Crush Saga

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A good puzzle game can hold your attention long enough to make the wait at the DMV tolerable. A great puzzle game can make you step out of line and eat your entire day before you’ve realized exactly what happened. Candy Crush Saga, for all its sickeningly sweet and intolerably adorable animations, is a perfect example of a great puzzle game.

After it has swallowed you hole and spat you back out, you may find yourself looking for a similar puzzle game to pass the time. Fortunately, we’ve got you covered with five of the best games like Candy Crush Saga.

Bejeweled

It’s kind of hard not to start off with the single most popular puzzle game of the digital age. In its various forms, Bejeweled is available on just about everything with a screen. You can play it on web browsers, game consoles, and there’s at least one version of the game in every smartphone platform on the market today. If you’re a fan of match style puzzle games there’s a good chance you’ll be a fan of at least one of the more modern adaptations of Bejeweled.

Bejeweled 2 has been published by EA Games for mobile as the be all end all of match style puzzle games, with options for users of every skill level. You scores can be ranked locally or globally, and leaving the game instantly saves your progress so you can actually do the thing you were waiting in line to do. For $2.99 this game is slightly more expensive than most in this genre, but offers plenty of reasons to keep you playing.

Diamond Dash

Continuing in the line of bright bubbly puzzle games with adorable characters that seem to have nothing to do with the actual puzzles is Diamond Dash. This game replaces the candy pieces with colorful gems and the little girl gets replaced with a panda bear on a magic carpet. Diamond Dash is a much simpler matching game with a very simple interface. These subtle differences make it just enough to shut the world out for hours of poking at your screen in search of a high score.

Instead of swapping gems to create matches, in Diamond Dash you poke at matches that already exist. The bigger the match you find, the more points you earn. As you poke a match it dissolves and the stack of gems fall and stack accordingly. In this race against the clock you have nothing on your mind but getting as many points as possible in time. If you’re clever you can create larger stacks and earn a ton of points at once. If you’d rather smack the screen with your finger repeatedly in a random fashion, you can get pretty far that way too. Diamond Dash is free, and features a Facebook tournament every week to see who the best player is.

Glow Jeweled

It’s not easy to find a match style puzzle game that isn’t positively dripping is cute things, but they are out there. Instead of a candy themed game, why not go back to your geek roots with something seemingly Tron inspired? Glow Jeweled features most of the same basic concepts as Candy Crush Saga, just heavily themed with a black background and neon shapes as your playing pieces. You slide pieces around to create matching sets, and the OpenFeint scoring system allows you to track your progress against your friends.

Glow Jeweled focuses on a level system on a timer, instead of a map based obstacle system. You progress to the next map when you have earned enough points on the current map. When you have earned the required points you level up, and the map switches. Bonus stacks earn larger explosions that can take out other pieces, earning you even more. The hints system will point out your next best move, but you only get three per game. Glow Jeweled is a ton of fun for $1.03, and for those less inclined to play a game dripping in cute.